Ever wonder how to reduce your Microsoft Project file from thousands of tasks down to a manageable few hundred, without deleting any? Have you tried filtering? This post discusses the steps to filter tasks in Microsoft Project.
Filtering is the act of reducing the number of visible tasks so that you only see what you are interested in. All the tasks will still exist in the MPP file, but you will only see tasks that correspond to your filter criteria. Follow these steps to filter tasks in Microsoft Project.
Create some tasks to filter by:
- Enter three tasks
- Set the durations to 10 hours, 20 hours, and 0 hours
- The results should look like the image below
Set up a new filter to show long tasks only:
- Choose Project, Filtered, More Filters…
- Click New
- Enter the name “Long tasks” (without the quotes)
- Click ‘Show in menu’
- Click in the ‘Field Name’ column, and choose ‘Duration
- Click in the ‘Test’ column and choose ‘is greater than’
- Click in the ‘Values(s)’ column and enter 10
- Click OK to save the new filter
- Nothing should change in your view
Activate your task filter:
- Choose Project, Filtered, Long Tasks (the new filter you created)
- Your view should now look like this image (hiding all the short tasks)
- Choose Project, Filtered, All Tasks to remove the filtering and show all tasks
–ray